Last week, Daenerys Targaryen lost most of her ships by being terrible at strategy and she continues that trend this week.
Hullo!
Daenerys and Jon Snow finally meet and Daenerys acts as haughty as she can possibly be. Either Jon Snow bends the knee to her and swears complete loyalty, or he is her enemy. Jon refuses.
Directly after this conversation, Varys informs Daenarys about Euron ambushing their ships and that Yara, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes are either captured or dead. She’ll probably need Jon Snow’s help and not the other way around. Whoops.
She gives Jon permission to mine the dragonglass, because she really, really needs him as an ally.
She should be nice to Jon Snow, anyway. He is her nephew, after all.
Bleh.
Melisandre is leaving Westeros for Volantis. I hope that she is gone for a long time and stops trying to bang princes.
Blargh.
Euron drags Yara and the Sand Snake through the streets of King’s Landing in a scene remeniscent of Cersei’s shame march.
Being given Ellaria, the woman who killed her only daughter, as a gift is enough for Cersei to agree to marry Euron, after the war is over.
Bum Bum Bum
Euron asks Jaime if Cersei likes a finger up her bum. Euron is the worst.
Go away, Urine. Nobody likes you.
YARG!
Cersei poisons Tyene Sand with the same poison lipstick that Ellaria used to kill Myrcella. Ellaria will be forced to watch her daughter die and rot.
Cersei’s brain is broken.
HUGGLES!
Brandon Stark finally returns to Winterfell and is reunited with his sister Sansa, but he’s some sort of creepy weirdo who can see all the timelines at once. His best friend is the creepy face tree.
Puberty hit Bran so hard, he has PTSD now.
Gross No More
Jorah Mormont has been completely cured of greyscale, so he can return to his life’s mission of beta-orbiting around Daenerys.
This whole greyscale plotline seems like a pointless waste of time.
I mean, Sam’s master was kinda mad about him disobeying orders and almost fired him from school, but he didn’t, so I guess nobody faced any consequences or learned anything.
GRAGH!
The Unsullied attack and capture Casterly Rock, but there was only a bare bones army there, because Casterly Rock actually isn’t that important, why protect it? Whoops.
And while the unsullied are dinking around the castle, Euron comes by and ganks all their ships. The unsullied are going to have to walk home. Whoops.
So where is the Lannister army? They’re laying siege to Highgarden. Whoops.
The Queen
Now, this is simply unacceptable.
Jaime gives Olenna poison to kill herself out of mercy, so that she won’t have to die by beheading or torture.
This is terrible! The quality of the banter is going to plummet, now.
At least she got to call Joffrey a cunt before she died.
So, there you have it, Daenerys got all her allies killed because she forgot that other countries have boats and for some reason she thought the Casterly Rock was important, despite the fact that all the Lannisters were in King’s Landing. Yeesh.
SPOILER ALERT! Why are you reading a recap if you want to avoid spoilers?
What even happened last week? Something about diarrhea and Ed Sheeran or something? Whatever.
On to this week!
There’s a lot of standing around and talking in this episode.
Meh.
Melisandre, who keeps escaping death, shows up to tell Daenerys that she’s “the prince that was promised”, or maybe not. Maybe it’s Jon Snow. R’hllor doesn’t communicate his prophecies very well.
I’m not really sure why anybody would still listen the “Lord of Light” at this point. He mostly just makes a lot of people get burnt alive and… not much else.
Despite the fact the Melisandre is always wrong and stupid, Daenerys sends a message to Jon asking him to come to Dragonstone.
Reading is Fundamental!
Even though the north obviously needs Daenerys’ dragons and dragonglass to defeat the white walkers, Sansa and Davos tell Jon not to meet with Daenerys.
They needed to give Sansa and Davos something to do, so they had them complain and waste time for the whole episode.
I mean we all know that Jon has to meet up with Daenerys, eventually. Just shut up and let him do it.
Ouchie!
Dragon fire can defeat a wight, but what can defeat a dragon? A giant scary crossbow invented by that madman Maester Qyburn, that’s what.
Nice Table!
Daenerys and her war council meet. They decide that the armies of Dorne and Highgarden are going to surround King’s Landing while the Dothraki army attacks Casterly Rock. Since Tywin Lannister died is there even anybody at Casterly Rock? I’d think that most of the Lannister army would be at King’s Landing protecting Cersei, now.
Whatever. They need to separate Daenerys’ army from everybody else for contrived plot-related reasons that will soon become apparent.
BUTT!
Well, we have confirmation: Despite being a eunuch, Grey Worm fucks.
BIG OUCHIE!
Yay! Sam discovered a cure for greyscale! Oh no! It involves ripping all of Jorah’s skin off!
I’m not really sure why they gave Jorah greyscale, if they they were just going to cure it right away.
Did they need to get Sam and Jorah together so Sam could be all like, “Hey, I knew your dad!” for some reason?
FOOD!
Hey, kids, it’s Hot Pie! Remember Hot Pie!?
Hot Pie is here to tell Arya that her brother, Jon Snow, is King in the North, now.
So, Arya decides to travel North. She wasted all that time travelling South and hanging out with Ed Sheeran for nothing!
(When do we get to see Ed Sheeran die?)
*GGRRRRR*
On her journey northward, Arya is briefly reunited with her lost direwolf, Nymeria, but Nymeria decides to run back off into the wilderness.
I guess the show only has so much budget to devote to direwolves and most of it’s going to Ghost this season.
YAARRR!!!
Whoops! While everyone was strategizing, they totally forgot that Euron Greyjoy was a thing. You’d figure that when they were making a plan that involved a bunch of sea travel, that they’d take into account the crazy guy with thousands of ships, but nope.
So, Euron Greyjoy goes berserk, murders the Sand Snakes and burns Asha’s entire fleet.
I guess D&D didn’t know what to do about Dorne, so they just killed everyone like they always do.
Good thing Daenerys’ impenetrable plot armour managed to protect her army from any harm.
At least Theon Greyjoy managed to escape by jumping into the water like a dork. But who is going to save him from the water? If only we knew somebody with a boat. (Gendry)
Hey, remember when I used to do terrible recaps of television shows? Those sure were the days.
I’m getting back into writing. I used to really like writing. Too bad some obsessive weirdo made it not fun for me anymore.
But, hey, how better to get back into writing than to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones? Well… Actually, there’s probably many, many better ways to get back into writing. But this is the way I’ve chosen, so nyah.
Well, D&D are almost entirely out of book to adapt, unless they want to finally cover Lady Stoneheart, so we’re pretty much in full-on fanfiction territory, now. Can D&D stand all on their and bring this thing to an exciting conclusion with just their combined powers of creativity? Probably not. But I’ve already sunk 7 years into this show, so I might as well ride it out to the end.
BLARGH
So, to start with, we have Arya finally exacting her revenge against Walder Frey and company. I think this moment would have been a lot more poignant if it wasn’t D&D’s goto solution for every dangling plotline to just kill off everyone involved.
What purpose does Rickon serve? Dead! What are we going to do about Stannis and his army? Dead! How is Cersei going to escape the Faith Militant? Dead!
What happened to Benjen Stark? Dead! Well… sorta.
At least they’ve remembered that Beric Dondarrion is a thing.
One of these days, maybe Gendry will dock his boat somewhere.
Remember that whole thing about Robert Baratheon and his many bastards? The North remembers.
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Hhmmm… What else happened? Well, Samwise Gamgee… Er… I mean, Samwell Tarly has to perform menial tasks for the greybeards at the Citadel in order to move up ranks in the Order to gain access to the secret books of arcane knowledge. This leads to very long montage of Sam cleaning up diarrhea and serving stew. It was very important for the viewer to make a permanent connection between diarrhea and stew. D&D have a vision, you see.
Ew
But, whatever, Sam gets impatient, so he just steals the key to the Hogwarts’ Library’s Restricted Section. There, he discovers a book with a map to a cache of dragonglass on Dragonstone.
You know, the first place I’d look for dragonglass would be Dragonstone, because duh, but nobody in Westeros has any common sense, so they have to be told obvious things.
Jorah the Friendzoned is also at the Citadel. He’s there for treatment for his greyscale (magic rock AIDS).
Why?
Later, Arya happens upon some genuine Lannister Soft Boys™. One of them is Ed Shereen for no reason and he’s singing the hit single off of his new album. It’s the stupidest thing ever!
And, man, do they really hammer it home that these are the nicest boys ever. They offer Arya some food, talk about how much they miss their families back home and just generally act too cute for words.
Obviously, they’re all going to die horribly.
So Many Steps
And then, Daenerys arrives at Dragonstone. We have to watch her climb the stairs for, like, half an hour to swelling music. It was epic and such.
I really liked this episode, but, at the same time, I thought that it added a bunch of confusing elements.
Henry, always being so dramatic.
Hey, Henry isn’t dead (Boo.), but he will be soon, if they don’t retrieve his heart from Pan.
And the lesson here is never to give your heart to anyone, especially if it’s literally.
There’s no toilet in there…
Back in the past Enchanted Forest, after Regina had cast the Dark Curse, she goes to Rumpelstiltskin to gloat. I’m not sure how this scene actually had time to happen, because, if I recall correctly, the curse cloud spread very quickly throughout the land and this scene is a couple of minutes long. Whatever. Regina and Rumpelstiltskin are always fun together, so let’s roll with it.
Rumpelstiltskin tells Regina that she shouldn’t be gloating, because, since she killed her own father, there is now a hole in her heart, and, one day, she’ll need to seek out his help to fill it. Regina is all like, “Nuh-uh! My revenge is absolute! I’ve got everything I could ever want!”
He was cute, before he could talk.
Well, lo and behold, it turns out that being the mayor of a cruddy podunk town isn’t enough to make Regina happy. In fact, the last time she could remember being really happy, was when she was hanging out with the young Owen Flynn (too bad he grew up to be such a butt). Regina decides she wants to adopt a baby. Personally, I think that she should have just made a baby with sexy, sexy Sheriff Graham, but I guess a literally heartless man might not make a good father.
But it will take a minimum of two years to adopt a baby and Regina wants one NOW. Indeed, she does end up seeking out Rumpelstiltskin’s help, only he’s just Mr. Gold here, because the curse altered his memory. Regina plays right into his hands.
Mr. Gold finds Regina a baby, which she names “Henry” after her father. Baby Henry is defective, though. He won’t stop crying. Regina gets paranoid about the actual origin’s of the baby, so she calls up Sidney Glass (I think Giancarlo Esposito actually phoned-in his performance of being on a phone hehe) and asks him to look up Henry’s birth parents and just when Regina finally gets Henry to stop crying, Sidney sends her information that points to the Saviour being Henry’s birth mother. Regina must return Henry to the adoption agency, or risk the Saviour coming to Storybrooke to retrieve the child.
And I’ve gotten confused about the rules of Storybrooke again. No one can enter or leave, but they can telephone people outside of the town and use the internet, apparently. There’s also the whole bit about time being stopped, although the residents of Storybrooke don’t notice because their memories are all wonky, wouldn’t the people they know in the outside world get confused because of it?
Hipsters can’t adopt.
Regina is unable to give up Henry. She loves him too much. This is bad news for the other family that the agency had lined-up, who just so happen to be John and Michael Darling, which doesn’t make any sort of sense. Apart from them probably not being adequate adoption candidates, the picture that Peter Pan had of Henry is him as an 11-year-old, not a baby. But, really, why didn’t they try to steal the baby from Regina? They would just open a portal to Neverland right after. It’s not like they’d get caught.
Come to Boston, where they’ll give a baby to anyone, even two brothers in their twenties.
Unable to cope with her fear of the Saviour coming and being a mother at the same time, Regina drinks a potion to wipe her memories.
So, bother Regina and Rumpelstiltskin had no memories of their past lives? Doesn’t that contradict a lot of the events of season 1? I had this theory back then that neither Regina or Rumpelstiltskin actually had their old memories, but they had read Henry’s book and guessed who they were in their past lives. It couldn’t have been that, could it?
…UGH
In the present, Regina and Emma interrogate the Lost Boys about Pan’s location and Felix is being a butt, as usual. Emma decides to offer to be a mother to all 40 of the Lost Boy, you know, because she’s uber good at being a mother and stuff, but, hey, the Lost Boys take the bait and tell her that Peter Pan is hanging out at his Thinking Tree.
Felix alon remains resolute in his loyalty to Pan, though. He doesn’t need a mother, anyhow. He’s about like, what, 30?
Their favourite superheroine is Wonder Woman.
Oh no! Think Thinking Tree was a trap! It has vines that get tighter the more regrets you have.
Neverland, the place where the malevolent fauna will force you into expository dialogue.
Snow White regrets abandoning Emma and Emma regrets continually letting Henry down, but what does Regina regret?
Regina doing what she does best.
REGINA REGRETS NOTHING! All of her horrible actions just led her to her greatest happiness: her son. She’s a better mother than both those whiners. WHAM! She rips her son’s her out of Pan’s chest.
Everyone returns to the ship, Regina returns Henry’s heart to his chest and casts a spell on him to prevent his heart from being taken ever again, which, really, she should have done years ago, what with heart removal being everyone’s favourite pastime in this universe.
And then something happens that made no sense to me. Peter Pan switches his Shadow with Henry’s right he gets sucked into Pandora’s box. Apparently, this was like switching souls, because Pan is in control of Henry’s body now, but, up until this point, we’ve seen Shadows act like autonomous entities and we’ve seen people talk to them like they were actual people themselves. We still don’t even know where Rumpelstiltskin’s Shadow went and he doesn’t seem like an empty shell without it.
I hope this doesn’t mean that Pan, as Henry, is going to convince them to turn around and go back to Neverland. We really need to get out of there.
In this episode, we learn a bunch more about Jenny Mills’ past.
Crazy Lady with a Gun
Still catching up…
The Boston Tea Party was Ichabod Crane’s idea? Is he involved in every big even from that era?
Why doesn’t Ichabod have a change of clothes yet?
Jenny had a string of abusive foster parents after being separated from Abbie.
Jenny travelled the world training with various freedom fighters and rebel groups? When? When she was a teenager?
Jenny also knew Sheriff Corbin and she would procure rare artifacts for him. Really? Again, while she was a teenager?
Why didn’t Corbin get Jenny out of her abusive situation? Why didn’t he tell Abbie that he knew her sister? It’s really bizarre. It seems a bit like he was only using her.
It’s Gunther!
There are sleeper cells of Hessian Warrior pretending to be regular people, but apparently they’re all German soldiers contracted by the British to fight in the against the Americans in the Revolutionary War 200 years ago, so, I don’t, maybe they should check all the German people’s basements for jars of organs.
Hey, Crane knows German. Why shouldn’t he? Crane knows a lot of stuff, yo!
General Washington seemed really concerned with demons and the like. Why didn’t he try to make peace with the British, so that they could join forces and fight the demons together? Were the British in league with the Antichrist.
All this talk about the Apocalypse and Revelations and they never mention Jesus’ role in it…
Boo!
It turns out the the mastermind behind the Hessian sleeper cells is a demon named “Moloch”, like the one described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s the same demon that Abbie and Jenny saw as children.
When Gunther said that the mastermind was someone that they all knew, I was really hoping that it was going to be Sheriff Corbin and then they could have a twist about how he was trying to destroy the Hessian from within or something.
Abbie says that she has a way to get Jenny out of the asylum in six months. This show’s first season ends in January, so I guess we won’t be seeing Jenny for the rest of the season then.
SPOILER ALERT! I’M LATE! I’M LATE! FOR A VERY IMPORTANT DATE!
I didn’t really like this episode, but let’s see if I can come up with something to say about it anyway.
Yummy!
One of the first things we learn in this episode is that Dr. Lyndgate is doped out of his mind most of the time. I looked it up and laudanum is a tincture of opium. So that’s fun.
Matching Pink Butterfly Net
So, to set the scene, we’re back in the past and Alice thinks that Cyrus is dead. She has been unceremoniously dumped back into Victorian England near her house.
A little girl runs up to Alice. Who is she?
SO MANY FEELINGS
It’s Alice’s half-sister, Millie!?
Time in Wonderland and Victorian England must work differently, because it turns out that several years have passed while she was in Wonderland, enough time for her father, Edwin, to start a whole new family.
Alice is much more concerned about losing the boyfriend she’s had for, like, 3 days, than the father she abandoned for a decade. The most important love is True Love™.
Grrrrrrrrr…
Alice’s new stepmother, Sarah, is evil and hates Alice, because of course she does. Once Upon a Time in Wonderland only subverts traditional female fairytale roles for its heroes, the villainous women have to all be clichés.
Wouldn’t it have been interesting if Alice’s new stepmother was the one that was sympathetic to Alice, the one defending Alice from a father that doesn’t understand her?
Somebody’s baking purple cookies!
Back to the present, Alice is wandering around the forest looking for Cyrus, because the producers paid a lot to rent out this section of the Vancouver forest and, buy gum, they’re going to get their money’s worth out of it.
So, Alice wanders around the Black Forest (Hey! It prefers to be called the “African-American Forest”) and she ends up in the Boro Grove, which is still pretty much the same forest, only it’s more purpley.
The first thing Alice does in the Boro Grove is inhale a strange, purple mist, because, you know, that’s what one should do when they come upon an unidentified gaseous substance. The mist make her all mimsy. Get it? It’s like “All mimsy were the borogoves”. It’s like that thing from that book by that guy!
Where’s the Walrus?
We meet the Carpenter from the poem The Carpenter and the Walrus. He doesn’t do anything really, except stand around and become a tree, because he inhaled the purple mist. His buddy, the Walrus, is nowhere to be found. They’re just name-dropping a character from Through the Looking-Glass to remind us that we’re still in Wonderland, because, really, without the occasional shout-out and fibreglass mushroom, this is just like any other generic fairytale world. I blame all the wandering about in the woods.
It’s a SHADE-OFF!
The Red Queen also wanders around the woods, because they needed to give her something to do this episode. She wants capture Cyrus for evil reasons. but, like, they’re reason’s that are slightly less evil than the reasons that Jafar want’s him for. We still don’t know what either of them are trying actually trying to accomplish and it’s hard to stay interested at extremely vague hints at potential evil doings.
The Red Queen is really mean to her Tweedle. What are the Tweedles, exactly? Is a Tweedle a type of critter, or is it a family name? When are we going to find out how they became David Bowie fans?
Anyway, she better start being nice to the Tweedles, or they’ll probably quit doing her hair up all pretty-like. Oh… And they’ll probably keep reporting her secrets to Jafar, which is what I assume the missing Tweedle is doing.
Awkward!
Back in the past, Alice is having a lot of trouble readjusting to Victorian England norms. Her evil stepmother wants to marry Alice off as soon as possible, because finding a good husband is the best a woman can hope for in Victorian England. Doesn’t Stepmom know that in Wonderland a girl can aspire to be a princess or an evil witch? It’s way more progressive in Wonderland.
And it’s not like Alice offers up any viable alternatives to her stepmother’s plan. Moping over your dead boyfriend and trying to convince people that Wonderland is real isn’t going to put food on the table, Alice.
Alice says that they should believe her about Wonderland, because love means never having to provide proof, or something. You know, my Uncle Vito told us to believe that he had stopped drink because we loved him, and then he drove his Honda Accord into a lake. Sometimes, love means throwing Uncle Vito into rehab. And so, Alice gets carted off to Bethlem Asylum for saying crazy-sounding things.
This is not good.
You know that purple mist from earlier? It turns you into a tree for some reason. Don’t worry, the Knave shows up to save her.
Why doesn’t the Knave start turning into a tree as well, you ask? Well, as it turns out, when Alice got the Knave’s heart back for him, he never bother putting it back in.
But the Knave doesn’t act heartless at all! Actually, I’d say that he seems to have the biggest heart of anyone on this show. He agreed to help the White Rabbit save Alice, even though there was nothing in it for him. He’s always trying to find nonviolent solutions to things, while Alice is going around stabbing everything. He apologized for breaking Silvermist’s heart. These aren’t the actions of a heartless man.
Greeting, my jolly-good chum!
Oh. Did I mention that Jafar is in Victorian England? Well he is and he stole some guy’s clothing and left him dead and naked in a field. Sure, Jafar could have probably just have magiced himself some new clothes, but the other way was more fun.
Jafar is probably going to do nasty things to Alice’s dad.
Again with the falling?
And then Cyrus fell off a cliff again, because it’s his favourite pastime.
Some other stuff:
According to the creators of the show, there is an entire Victorian England realm, so this show doesn’t actually involve any time travel. I’m still waiting for them to go to the Star Wars realm.
Seriously, what the Heck happened to Elizabeth Lizard? Did she die? Why does no one seem to care?
